After indie succeses, Linux is finally attracting mainstream game publishers.

Ubuntu’s built-in Software Center, which allows users of the popular Linux distribution to purchase software, is attracting game developers. A recent partnership with the backers of the Humble Indie Bundle proved successful. Mainstream publishers like EA are also starting to take an interest. The Linux desktop may finally be achieving credibility as a target for commercial games.

The Humble Indie Bundle is a popular promotion that allows users to pay what they want for a selection of computer games created by independent developers. The games are cross-platform compatible and distributed without any DRM. The fifth bundle, which recently launched, attracted a considerable audience on the Linux desktop.

The organizers of the bundle partnered with Canonical to make the games easily available to participating Ubuntu users through the Ubuntu Software Center. According to an entry on the official Ubuntu application developer blog, the Ubuntu Software Center served the bundle to nearly 10,000 buyers within the first 72 hours after it launched.

The Humble Indie Bundle website, which publishes average purchase prices for users on each platform, indicates that Linux users voluntarily paid more than Mac and Windows users. According to the current statistics, the Linux average is $12.50 compared to the $7.97 average for Windows users.

These results aren’t unexpected—the Linux audience has shown similar generosity in previous iterations of the Humble Indie Bundle. Wolfire Games, which distributed its title Lugaru in the first bundle, found that Linux users contributed twice as much as Windows users on average. Almost a quarter of Wolfire’s revenue from the bundle came from Linux users.

There is clearly a healthy audience for commercial games on the Linux desktop, but the relatively small number of total users and the lack of an effective distribution channel for reaching them has historically deterred mainstream game developers from treating the platform as a first-class citizen.

Canonical’s efforts to turn the Ubuntu Software Center into a retail platform are helping to remedy this issue. Games like Braid, Oil Rush, and World of Goo have reportedly seen strong sales on Ubuntu and rank among the most popular paid applications in the Ubuntu Software Center. That success is helping to attract bigger publishers, such as EA, which recently added several of its HTML-based games to the Ubuntu Software Center lineup.

Linux gaming could soon get another major boost in the form of Steam support. Valve denied plans to bring Steam to Linux in 2010 when evidence surfaced that suggested the possibility of a port. Valve later embraced the opportunity that Linux presents, finally confirming to Linux hardware news site Phoronix in April that the Steam client and Source Engine are on the way. The latest news suggests that Steam could possibly even arrive this year.

Linux gamers have traditionally had to use Wine and similar binary compatibility layers to run Windows versions of games on the Linux operating system. The growing availability of native ports is welcome news for Linux enthusiasts who have hoped for acceptance from mainstream game publishers.

The popularity of these games also serves to illustrate the potential value of Canonical’s Software Center as a catalyst for attracting third-party commercial developers to the Linux platform. It’s not clear yet whether this success can be translated to other kinds of software, but it’s a promising sign that developers are starting to take notice of the Linux audience.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised to see so many games in the Humble Bundles doing *native* ports of games for Linux. I think that along with support from Steam and Ubuntu will really help the gaming landscape on Linux.

Actually, I think the software center model of doing things may help even more than the native ports. Having the game simply installed properly, rather than having to worry yourself over where that game got installed in the directory structure will make things so much smoother, even if the game is running with Wine in the background.

I'm interested to see where this is going. My PC gaming habits have dwindled (I prefer sitting on the couch messing with a console) but I still play now and then. I've been monkeying with Linux Mint lately and like how snappy it is. It would be nice to have more options on my PC of where and how I can do things.

Love the main image. That's where some people's gaming experiences on Linux started and ended, and it gave me a good chuckle.

I'm really excited about Steam on Linux, since I've tried to at least partially stick to my Linux box for most day-to-day usage, other than its media-server duties. Most of the games I want to play on Steam are pretty lightweight (think Braid, Bastion, Aquaria) and should have no trouble on a simple Linux box with integrated graphics.

Moreover, at one point in college I almost exclusively used Linux for several months for school purposes, and the only thing keeping me from sticking to it longer-term was the dearth of games on Linux. The best I could muster was the demo for whatever Unreal Tournament game was out at the time.

Seriously, games are the single biggest thing that's held me back from adopting Linux for over a decade now. I'd love for that to change. When all the best titles make the leap, I can too.

Gamers can be a passionate and tenacious bunch, and PC gamers especially like to hack & modify and find creative new uses for their software. Linux should be the perfect platform for that... if they can get the commercial studios to cooperate.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised to see so many games in the Humble Bundles doing *native* ports of games for Linux. I think that along with support from Steam and Ubuntu will really help the gaming landscape on Linux.

Actually, I think the software center model of doing things may help even more than the native ports. Having the game simply installed properly, rather than having to worry yourself over where that game got installed in the directory structure will make things so much smoother, even if the game is running with Wine in the background.

Edit: Wording.

The Humble Indie Bundle actually handles some of the game porting themselves.

Seriously, games are the single biggest thing that's held me back from adopting Linux for over a decade now. I'd love for that to change. When all the best titles make the leap, I can too.

This. As much as I like Win 7, the inevitable forward march of progress dictates that I'll need to move on at some point, and I don't want to move to something like Win 8. I want a desktop computer that acts like one.

Games are the main applications tying me to Windows. Make them available elsewhere and I'll make a genuine effort to move with them.

Being OpenGL Android IOS and OSX based games, it would be easy to port NEW GAMES to GNU/Linux.

Also OLD GAMES.

And of course the USC is easier for users than actual DVDs.

Games are faster in Ubuntu - 100 HZ kernel - than at MS WOS - 300 HZ kernel - but much faster at SAbayon - 1000 Hz kernel - if ubuntu make a gamers 1000 Hz kernel with Sabayon config it will run as hell.

Ubuntu has a low latency kernel for ubuntu studio and you can install it - perfect also for multimedia and video or music edition - but I think Sabayon settings are even better.

Is it easier to consider doing ports now that OS X gaming is increasingly more common with large development studios? I don't know that there is a correlation, but that was my first thought...

That, as well as iOS and Android depend on OpenGL rather than DirectX for its GPU access.

Audio may be a different beast tho, unless SDL or similar can be leveraged somehow.

OpenAL works well crossplatform, iirc.

It is still in use? I thought it was long dead by now.

I've come across several games still using it, and it works just fine. UT2004 in linux relies on it too even, though it's a bear to get working (for that I blame the linux compat patch for being picky about load paths)

Wakfu, Minecraft, and pretty much anything written in Java works perfectly on Linux.

I'm shocked to see Valve put on Linux native games... From what I've seen getting C/C++ games to work cross platform is typically a massive headache. All those games were different developers using different dev tools. I know Bastion was C# and already was ported to Mono, I imagine most of the others were C/C++.

The only EA games available on Linux (not counting wine) are those crappy free to play EA website games that have links wrapped in a .deb package put up only to inflate Ubuntu's Game section on it's store thingy. The only way EA was involved, was in not suing Canonical's ass for this. They actually said they do not plan Linux ports anytime soon. I kinda have hope for Valve but i can't think their efforts are going anywhere.

The only truly succesful games on Linux are some indie games (i.e. the gazillion humble bundles).

To people that say that Android games run on Linux, i laugh in your face and dare you to run them using either only the Android kernel (and optionally the open source licensed, not necessarilly free, software of your choice) or port them to GNU/Linux which is the only way they "will run" on Linux.

I have been waiting for games to come to Linux for more than 10 years, and i gave up, but i'm happy with the media features and capabilities that i can use it for.

EA is the real test for gaming on Linux. It is not surprising that Linux users throw money at devs when they hear the magic word "indie" but lets see how they give money to the big bad corporations that cell $100 AAA titles.

Can't help but think that more game dev attention to linux will probably lead to nvidia & ati taking more active roles in fleshing out Wayland and improving their driver performance (and support) for the OS.

Linux gamers have traditionally had to use Wine and similar binary compatibility layers to run Windows versions of games on the Linux operating system. The growing availability of native ports is welcome news for Linux enthusiasts who have hoped for acceptance from mainstream game publishers.

If linux becomes a serious gaming system there's no reason for me to stick with windows

"Serious" gaming went to consoles years ago. Not even Microsoft releases games for Windows any longer.

I guess you're just trolling, but never heard of Games for Windows Live (granted, it is one of the best reasons to not game on a PC sometimes...). Microsoft still publishes plenty of games though. They don't really make many games at all though anymore, Halo, Forza, Fable and Kinect stuff is about it.

Personally, I'd love to see this. I have a HTPC set up for gaming and movies, a $500 PC with a $100 windows license. I would have much rather put that money into a better GPU instead, all I really need is some kind of platform to launch games off. Which makes me think, in the long term, there's no reason developers couldn't move towards their own linux for gaming. All it needs is good drivers and they could make it a fairly secure distribution platform, far moreso than just an app within windows doing it.

Is it easier to consider doing ports now that OS X gaming is increasingly more common with large development studios? I don't know that there is a correlation, but that was my first thought...

That, as well as iOS and Android depend on OpenGL rather than DirectX for its GPU access.

Audio may be a different beast tho, unless SDL or similar can be leveraged somehow.

I believe that there's a fair number of cross-platform frameworks that handle graphics, audio, and control (ex: JUCE, though you can't use that commercially) that are stable and mature.

I would argue that the fact that developers have to think cross-platform at all (iOS/Android instead of just Windows) means that a lot of the effort in separating platform code from non-platform code is already being done.

Though many of the posters are optimistic about "ditching Windows", I don't think that's realistically going to happen soon unfortunately. Driver performance is going to be a big factor in Linux gaming, especially because neither ATI nor nVidia seem to tune their Linux drivers as tightly as their Windows ones. Even Mac OS X, which has been viewed as a potential target for gaming especially after its switch to Intel, suffers from low performance and low visibility - only a handful of publishers still will publish to Mac OS shortly after Windows, and the Mac OS X desktop population probably outnumbers the Linux desktop population by 10 to 1 (and is in turn outnumbered by Windows by at least 80 to 1).

Most of the games I want to play on Steam are pretty lightweight (think Braid, Bastion, Aquaria) and should have no trouble on a simple Linux box with integrated graphics.

You may be aware of this already, but all of those games were available in previous humble bundles, and all have native linux versions available as a result. I've played two of those three in Linux, and in the near future I'll install Bastion in my Mint partition (been playing it in Win7 so far).

A further thought: If game publishers are trying to sell to a larger-than-they-thought market of linux gamers, making linux distros a major gaming platform will have to wait if microsoft is going to introduce the "secure boot" hassle in just a few months' time.

I think that the major publishers have waited too long and will have killed off this opportunity through their own inertia

Man if we could get the gaming PC industry to switch to Linux..... what a beautiful thing it would be.

It would require both the GFX driver makers and the game studios to work really hard though, and OpenGL(or an alternative) would have to get brought up to snuff. I won't hold my breath. But I sure would use it.

Though many of the posters are optimistic about "ditching Windows", I don't think that's realistically going to happen soon unfortunately. Driver performance is going to be a big factor in Linux gaming, especially because neither ATI nor nVidia seem to tune their Linux drivers as tightly as their Windows ones.

I'm not saying that the Linux drivers will always be tuned to the same level as Windows, especially when we get into game-specific tuning that starts replacing shaders based on executable detection, but at least on these benchmarks, Linux + Binary Drivers holds its own fairly well.